The Blackmagic Cinema Camera is on the market for quite some time. Or is it? Well, due to some manufacturing problems you cannot get one after the launch. We were hoping that the company could manage the issue but it seems that the problem is more complex than it might seem. The company decided to follow the Kaizen road and send its own experts to the maker of the sensors for the camera. As we wrote in September the sensors that were shipped to Blackmagic had some defects and couldn't be used to assemble the cameras. Now Blackmagic's experts will try to resolve the issue at the source.

Grant Petty, the CEO of Blackmagic Design, once again decided to explain what's the cause of the problem and how they are trying to find a solution:

"As I have explained in earlier posts, we have been dealing with an issue from our sensor supplier where the glass that covers the front of the sensor has been contaminated and they have been working on that issue. They realized they had a contamination issue that turned out to be caused by the packaging of the glass was shipped to their factory and so that contaminated glass was used on the sensors and sent to us.

(...)

Working out what was going wrong is what we have been busy doing over the last week. It’s going to get a little technical here, however I think everyone wants to know what’s going on, instead of platitudes. (...) The first batch of sensors we got that we used for developing the camera and that were fine when we started production were manufactured by a completely different company to the second and subsequent batches of sensors. I could not believe this news when I heard it today as it explains a lot.

Our current understanding is that the company that has been bonding on the glass is crap and they have been contaminating the glass when bonding it. Because the sensor suppliers test process was also bad, it meant that no one really knew what was going on and it’s been weeks and weeks of confusion.

The sensor supplier is getting some new sensors made at the original supplier, which we should get test data back on late this week. Once we see this we will know if the original supplier can make the parts without contamination and so we can start building cameras again. I don’t know why they changed glass bonding companies.

(...)

The current plan is to get some sensors from the original glass bonding company and based on their upgraded testing we should know more at the end of the week if we are going to get a good supply of sensors starting to ship using that new company.

I will let you all know later this week or early next when we get some of these sensors to build cameras with and will know if we can start production full speed again."

As you can see Blackmagic is working hard to solve the issue and let's hope that they will be able to begin full production soon.